


Better Than Hershey's

by XtaticPearl



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Babies, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-14
Updated: 2016-11-14
Packaged: 2018-08-31 00:17:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8555263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XtaticPearl/pseuds/XtaticPearl
Summary: Nobody blinked when Tony, safe in his suit, Vision with his synthezoid protection, and Clint, safe in his perch on a building, got away from the consequences safe.What surprised everyone though was what happened when Tony Stark was faced with a team of babies, including his boyfriend.





	

“I am not touching it”

“Please do not call her an ‘it’, Barton, she will eat you alive when she gets back to her usual self,” Tony told Clint calmly as he made funny faces for a curious looking Sam.

“Still not touching it– _her,”_ Clint amended in the last second and eyed the teary-eyed baby with a flop of soft red hair cautiously.

“I have seven babies already, Clint, I _do not_ need you to behave like one right now,” Tony said pointedly in a baby voice so as to not spoil the mood of the now calm Sam who had finally deigned it acceptable to have his diaper changed by Tony.

“She poops!” Clint said like it was the greatest discovery made in the century, shooting accusing eyes at the baby Natasha, as though she was doing just for the purpose of annoying him.

“So do you. You don’t see all of us using gloves to handle you,” Tony pointed out as he scooped up Sam and placed him in the middle of the pillow field, stretching his back with a small groan.

“She poops in her _pants_ ,” Clint stressed before frowning, “Well, her diapers.”

“Do I have to remind you of the time when Thor almost dropped you from the Eiffel Tower?” Tony asked casually and Clint pointed at him accusingly.

“ _We do not talk about that!”_ Clint hissed but Tony simply rolled his eyes and grinned while blowing a raspberry at Sam when the baby blew one at him.

“Fine, fine, Mr. Party Pooper,” Tony chuckled and scooped up a freshly changed Sam before turning towards Clint with a mocking look, “Give me my princess. You can go handle the updates on the baby things Pepper’s sending.”

Clint took off without a second thought and a sloppy salute that made Tony roll his eyes again.

“Your best friend, princess, is a little mouse,” Tony informed baby Natasha as he crouched before her and placed a wide-eyed but silent Sam next to her, “And he’s not even of the cute kind.”

Natasha giggled and Tony nodded to himself with satisfaction, winking at her before getting to the next diaper change deftly.

It came as a surprise to no one when Reed Richards engineered yet another mysterious and completely insane device that somehow got into the wrong hands. It didn’t even come as a surprise to anyone when the ray-gun turned to to be a de-aging one and a budding teen villain used it like he was handling a hose - shooting everyone in front of him aimlessly. Nobody blinked when Tony, safe in his suit, Vision with his synthezoid protection, and Clint, safe in his perch on a building, got away from the consequences safe.

What surprised everyone though was what happened when Tony Stark was faced with a team of babies, including his boyfriend.

Nothing in Tony’s past had suggested to the world that Tony liked babies. If it were baby bots then people would have thought about it, but real live children were a different topic altogether. SHIELD agents had eyed the genius warily when he had marched out of the HQ, pushing Steve and Natasha’s strollers with ease and confidence, baby Bruce attached to his front. He had even had the sense to put both Steve and Bucky in a single, wide stroller when Bucky had not stopped wailing without Steve in his presence. Clint had followed Tony with a bit more hesitance and caution, pushing Bruce’s and Wanda’s strollers, and Vision had pitched in to take charge of Thor and Pietro. Maria Hill had been explicit in her surety that Tony would screw up with the kids.

Vision had taken to sending her pictures of the happy babies every fifteen minutes in retaliation.

Tony was jerked back to the present when he felt someone tapping at his ankle and looked down to see the face of baby Steve looking up at him, a hand wrapped around Tony’s toe, a wide gleeful smile fixed on his face.

“Whatcha doin’ there, munchkin?” Tony asked and he would probably shudder and feel weird about babying his boyfriend later but right now he had a crawling and thankfully not-sick baby Steve at hand, er leg, so he was fine.

“Shee” Steve gurgled and Tony had to bite his lips to not laugh. 

“Don’t you have other toys to play with, you frisbee hoarder?” Tony tutted but bent and scooped up Steve with a whooshing sound that sent the thin child into peals of laughter. Tony brought Steve up to his face and rested his forehead against the baby’s, looking at him with warmth.

“No shield,” he said firmly, remembering how Steve had thrown the shield toy at Bucky the last time he had been playing with it.

“Shee” Steve repeated on a whine and Tony brushed his nose against Steve’s.

“No. You can play with your squishy friends till you learn to not throw things at people,” Tony teased and blew a raspberry against Steve’s cheek when the baby insistently patted Tony’s cheek hard. 

“Sheee _eeeee”_ Steve’s voice took on a laughing tone when Tony swung him around in a flying arc before carrying him over to the couch where he had left his other babies sleeping in the middle of the pillow field he had created. With Steve busy trying to eat Tony’s hand, the genius took a minute to observe the tableau his baby team-mates presented.

Bruce was lying tummy down nearest to the perimeter of the pillow boundary, his chubby hands fisted near his head and his bottom sticking up in the air, looking like a tadpole mid-swim. To his right, Thor was sleeping with his rosebud mouth open and looking like he fell asleep while biting off Bruce’s hair, his hands lightly curled around Bruce’s duck onesie. Pietro was sleeping like the cat he was, curled around Wanda even though he must be suffocating her. To her credit, Wanda was sleeping peacefully, albeit sucking her thumb. Tony thought about maybe trying to remove it from her mouth but then that would probably set off a chain reaction of waking babies. 

His eyes moved on to Sam next, who was _definitely_  trying to do something to Bucky because both of them were a ball of limbs, Sam’s head burrowed under Bucky’s sole arm and Bucky’s knee digging into Sam’s chest. There was a lot to be said about flexibility and their basic idea but Tony was considerably wise in the moment, in that he preferred to move forward from _that_  thought process. Natasha was next, with her head resting against Bucky’s bum, and Tony seriously hoped that FRIDAY was taking pictures because the _jokes_  he could make about this later were too good to pass up on.

He felt a thwack against the side of his head and jerked back to the present, looking at the Steve baby he was carrying, who looked entirely unrepentant at hitting Tony.

“This is abuse of cuteness, I’m pretty sure of it,” Tony told him mock-seriously and Steve blinked owlishly at him before trying to bite Tony’s nose. “Yeah, that’s not better,” Tony said as he leaned back a bit before placing a hand behind Steve’s neck and guiding his head to the crook of Tony’s neck, doing his wiggly calm dance.

Steve bounced with him silently and for once, Tony let himself be the caregiver he always claimed he wasn’t cut out to be.

When Clint came back to check on them, he found Tony sleeping beside the pillow field, one arm draped over as many babies as he could cover and resting his head on Bruce’s pillow.

Needless to say, Clint stored the moment as evidence for his own jokes later.

****

It was ridiculous, Rhodey thought as he watched in amusement when Tony handled three different conversations with Bucky, Bruce, and Natasha. Wanda was sitting quietly in Clint’s lap, looking out the window with wonder as people and cars and vibrance of all shades passed by the ice cream store. Sometimes she would look back at the table and bang her pudgy little hands on the top till Tony leaned over and kissed her forehead, before getting back to her window watching with a happy clam grin.

“It’s ridiculous,” Rhodey said, interrupting Tony’s babble mid-rant and the genius in yellow shades shot him a look over Steve’s head as the baby soldier tried to chew his way through Tony’s t-shirt collar.

“What is?” Tony asked, absently patting Bucky’s head when the baby began to make displeased noises at having his conversation interrupted.

“This,” Rhodey gestured to the sight in front of him, of three babies sitting _on_  the table around Tony who was trying to feed them all with a single large ice-cream sundae, “everything.”

“You saying I’m a ridiculous dad, honeybun? Cause I’m telling you -” Tony shot out a hand to gently stop Natasha from crawling off the table “- I’m figging awesome.”

“Yeah, an awesome babysitter,” Clint muttered under his breath, his eyes wide when Wanda tried to squirm in his lap.

“It’s called parenting, Birdbrain, not babysitting,” Tony huffed and Rhodey grinned softly at the affronted look, knowing that people always underestimated how much Tony could care when the times called for it.

“I’m talking about the kissing,” Rhodey clarified before Clint could continue the argument and Tony raised an eyebrow at him so he continued, “You know, the competition you’ve got going here?”

“My kisses _are_ better than Hershey’s ,” Tony winked before asking, “What’re you talking about, weirdo?” even as he succumbed to Thor’s loud demand for attention from near Clint and leaned over to blow a raspberry at his soft cheek much to the baby God’s delight.

“Oh please,” Rhodey rolled his eyes with a grin, bouncing a curiously babbling Sam in his lap, “You’re telling me you don’t see it?”

At Tony’s blank look Rhodey sighed and gestured pointedly at Bucky who was pulling at Tony’s hand insistently. Tony shot Rhodey a confused frown but turned to Bucky and continued his babble he had left mid-way with his rapt audience.

Rhodey bit back a laugh when it kept happening, every baby demanding Tony’s attention for hugs and kisses and raspberries and eskimo kisses. Even Clint could see it, the unconscious contest for Tony’s kisses among the Avenger babies, and the archer met Rhodey’s eyes with an eye-roll of his own when Tony remained oblivious to it throughout their time at the ice cream parlor. 

It was Day 2 of the kid adventures, and SHIELD was working double time to find a reversal of the problem, but Rhodey knew that Tony wasn’t seeing this as a problem. When he had been called to meet the kids, Rhodey had been expecting to pitch in and help Tony handle the little ones but he had been pleasantly surprised to see that the genius, quite literally, had it in control. If anything, it was Clint who was jittery and nervous but that too was a bit better over time.

Now, sitting in a small, unrecognizable ice cream parlor with a bunch of kids making a mess out of ice creams and Tony Stark looking happier than ever, Rhodey wondered how Tony still wasn’t seeing it. He had always been good at caretaking when he took somebody as his responsibility, despite what people rumored about him. His bots and AIs were proof of that. And now, seeing all the babies looking at him like he had hung the moon and the stars, Rhodey wondered how Tony still didn’t see that his own magic. 

“Clint, no,” he heard Tony say and looked up to see Tony still talking to the kids in front of him. Looking to his right, Rhodey saw Clint sitting still, hand half-way below the table, looking like he had been caught red-handed. Curious, Rhodey leaned back and looked under the table to bite back a grin.

“Don’t pick it up,” Tony said and Clint whined.

“But…ice-cream,” the archer explained with a pitiful look and looked at Wanda balefully, like she was the reason the ice cream scoop had fallen.

“Get yourself another,” Tony said and Rhodey swallowed a laugh at the puppy dog look on Clint’s face.

“But Tooony…”

“No,” Tony was firm in his tone and Clint grumbled to himself but sat back up straight, much to Rhodey’s amusement.

When they were piling back into the car, Rhodey saw Tony kiss Pietro’s cheek as the baby bounced excitedly in Clint’s arms, before leaning up to press a quick peck on Clint’s cheek as well.

“Good job, birdy” Tony grinned before moving around the car to get in, leaving a sputtering but gleeful looking Clint in his wake.

Rhodey hid his grin at the knowledge that not even adults were immune to Tony’s kissing spree or magic.

*****

It took them time till Day 3 to finally get the reversal formula right and bring back the Avengers to their adult forms. There was a lot of grumbling and embarrassment among the adults, but everybody was back to normal and things went back to as they were before.

Except for the occasional times when Tony would unconsciously drop a kiss to the forehead or cheek of the Avengers whenever he was either not fully awake or was rushing off in a hurry.

Seeing as nobody seemed to mind, it wasn’t turned into an embarrassment.

Seeing as they all kept count of their Tony Kisses and the competition continued without Tony’s realization, it was turned into another normal thing for the Avengers family.

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback please <3


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